Lettuce pause for a moment to ponder PETA’s tofu tube steak suggestions

Whenever someone asks me if there are any foods I don’t eat, I always forget to mention hot dogs, because, er, frankly, I don’t think of them as food. Although I’ll eat one once in awhile, I put them in the same category as Twinkies or a McMeal Deal: a thing I will chew and taste and swallow if there’s no actual organic matter around. But ignore my foodie pretensions. This is America, and it’s National Hot Dog Month, for cryin’ out loud. So grab a white bread bun, some French’s mustard, and stick a wiener in your mouth. To make sure you’re doing it up right, download a copy of the 2009 Hot Dog Month Planning Guide (6.1MB PDF), and to satisfy your appetite for tube steak knowledge, grab a copy of Frank Facts About Hot Dogs while you’re at it. They use appetizing phrases like “meat trimmings”, “stainless steel choppers blend the meat”, and “processed intestines” to further seduce you. And did you know that Americans will eat about 2 billion hot dogs this month? If we did our math correctly, those hot dogs laid end-to-end would reach 189,393 miles, which is about 4/5 of the way to the moon. So, while July 22 is National Hot Dog Day, I think the National Hot Dog & Sausage Council needs to hire a new PR firm. Although they had enough savvy to create a Facebook Fan Page and a YouTube channel PETA already seems to have stolen their thunder by protesting on Capitol Hill July 16. And since we’ve given so much time to wieners and dogs today, let’s give equal time to breasts and monkeys with the Breasts Not Animal Tests game. I scored 33,375 points, but the breasts just came too fast at the end. Got any interesting hot dog or sausage links to share?

Foot long? Try 196 foot long!